Last Thursday the Sioux City Journal did an online poll that asked What is your greatest fear? and asked for a choice from a list of five possibilities. As is shown above, results were:
1] 33.5% Snakes and/or spiders
2] 30.3% Heights
3] 27.1% Public speaking
4] 5.2% Dancing in public
5] 3.9% Flying
The article showed a pie chart, from which I scaled the angles for the 4th and 5th items. Ranking for the first three items is the same as found in a March 2014 YouGov survey on U.S. adults, where for Very Afraid there were 32% snakes, 24% heights, and 20% public speaking. (In that survey 4th was 19% spiders, followed by 15% being closed in a small space and 14% flying on an airplane).
The 4th item, dancing in public, was a surprise. I don’t recall seeing it as a question before. It isn’t on the 51-item Fear Survey Schedule II or the 108-item Fear Survey Schedule III, which I’ve blogged about.
Where had that question come from, and was it about a fear of dancing itself, or a fear of being arrested for an illegal act? Back in 1984 the movie Footloose described the fictitious town of Bomont, which had a ban on teen dancing and was based on the real town of Elmore City, Oklahoma. Elmore City relented in 1980, and began allowing a prom. I found that the musical version of Footloose was performed by the community theater of Sioux City back in 2013. Perhaps that had inspired the poll question.
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